“Faith, we may put up our pipes, and be gone” – Romeo and Juliet, IV.V.2756[1] It is easy to forget that washing machines weren’t standard appliances until the 1950s. The dryer lagged behind a bit, but could be found in most homes by the 1960s. The days of spending a majority of the morning scrubbing […]

How long should a house last? Fifty years? Ehh. That seems a bit short for something that comes with a price tag of several hundred thousand dollars. One hundred years, maybe? Not bad. This is longer than the average life expectancy. A couple hundred years? This is the goal, right? Shouldn’t a house last as […]

The image is iconic. An old fashioned wood frame window, miniature snow drifts neatly cresting in the bottom corners of the panes, the rest of the glass artfully decorated by Jack Frost, all juxtaposed against warm reassuring radiance from a cozy living room or den. In visual depictions, the wintry window is the plane that […]

Appearance For home inspectors, it is always Christmas. … and Halloween …and the Fourth of July Really any holiday you can imagine. For those of us who amble through attics and creep through crawlspaces where folks file their holiday furnishings, it is not unusual to find ourselves between an inflatable Grinch and a sheaf of […]

In the spirit of honesty I will admit up front that I cannot precisely nail down the origin of this idiom. [Sigh of disappointment] The earliest attestations I can find are from late 19th century publications, but the idea, and maybe even the exact phase, are almost certainly older.[1] The saying is, at its core, […]

“Seventy percent of all archeology is done in the library… research, reading” – Indiana Jones Indiana Jones is more action-hero than pedantic professor, but moviegoers do get glimpses of Indiana’s academic drudgery, mostly as a comic contrast. In part, these hints to Indiana Jones the bookworm serve to help the audience understand how the fedora […]

“The cold night will turne vs all to Fooles, and Madmen.” – William Shakespeare, King Lear Has anyone coined the phrase, Low-No? As in low or no cost. You know, like Bo-Go (buy one get one free). If this isn’t a thing, it should be. Maybe a catchy spelling like Lo-No will help it gain […]

It won’t be too much longer before Halloween will arrive and drive many of us to the front porch with a brimming bowl of candy, wondering if dolling out Reese Cups to small children makes us enablers. Personally, I remind myself that most grocery stores have had Halloween candy out since mid-August, and that […]

Florida and the Gulf Coast have hurricanes. The Midwest has tornadoes. California has wildfires and earthquakes. The Shenandoah Valley has radon. Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and earthquakes, radon is never going to grab headlines. Though a dangerous natural phenomenon – it is the second leading cause of lung cancer behind only smoking – there’s nothing […]

Language presents puzzling paradoxes. A statement like, “It’s raining” is, in many ways, totally inadequate. Rain covers everything from a short shower to storms so strong they change people’s lives forever. The simple noun belies a broad breadth of weather with the simple common denominator of precipitation. Not surprisingly, English has an almost endless array […]